


Orbit

by Cards_Slash



Series: Inertia or Laws of Motion [1]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 10:29:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not the perfect love story.  It's not even the perfect love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orbit

It was Thursday when George met Winona and it wasn’t look-don’t-touch. It was don’t-look, don’t-touch, don’t-even-think-about-it-little-boy. It shouldn’t have bugged him because she was a bleached-blonde hair flip of everything he said he’d never wanted out life. The kind of girl that had Sam drooling on his shoulder, pushing hands against his back just to get him to move _out of the way_ and definitely not closer to _her_. Everything about her was one thing wrong right after another—

The leather jacket and the cheerleader skirt, the black lips and the pale pink polish on her fingernails, the boots and the silvery-thin hair clips tucking her bangs out of the way. She was on a table spilling beer out of a glass mug while she sang like a little bird that just wanted to be free-free-far-away-from here. 

When some man with bigger fists than brains grabbed her by the ankle, she jumped off the table and started a brawl. When he got dragged into the middle of it, her elbow slammed into his nose (he didn’t much figure that was on purpose) and she rounded on him and was halfway to punching him again when a sweet little smile broke out across her face and she said: _sorry, that wasn’t meant for you_ like it was a real apology.

\--

Sam started it, years later, when it didn’t seem so much like an accusation but more like gratitude, George would still be saying the same thing. Sam started it with his big ideas about doing no-good-things. 

George was content with school books and his old desk that was made by hand and shipped all the way from Pennsylvania special freight. The desk represented what he wanted to be—solid. Respectable. Dependable, if at least a bit old fashion. Next to the sleek metal frame of his bed and shelves it seemed out of place and George could relate to that too.

Sam interrupted his life. Sam showed up with his black leather jacket with the twin red stripes down the arms and his shiny black helmet and threw his arms up in the air over pointless things like books and studying and curfews.

“The night is young and so are we!” Sam shouted at him. “Put down the damn padd, get your shoes on and let’s go.”

“Sam,” he said.

“No is not an answer. Now. Shoes.” Sam would have stood there all night with his foot tapping the wood floor (shoes were left at the door, only bare feet were allowed past the welcome mat) until George was driven crazy or agreed to go.

It saved time to go. The sooner he caved, the sooner they went, the sooner Sam realized that George didn’t like half-naked loose women, strange-faced drunk guys and beer soaked shoes. 

\--

George had a plan. It started in middle school when the nice man in the crisp black uniform came to an assembly to teach them things about _space_ and _exploration_ and invited them all to stay after school the next day and find out more about how they could join Starfleet. 

His father had signed the permission form with a strange glitter in his eye. The old man hadn’t lifted two feet from the solid earth in his entire life but he talked big about things that were far away from where they were. George had come home with big plans of being part of a crew—a communications officer or a science officer or even a doctor.

That Christmas all George got were books about Starfleet and space travel and alien species he’d never seen before. He was sitting on the middle of his bed staring at pictures of famous Captains and fantastic-looking silver space ships when he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

So he made a plan and he put it on the wall and he looked at it every day before he left for school. It was a good plan; the well-thought-out and meticulously-executed type of plan that Starfleet would have been proud of.

\--

Sam was at his back when the sirens broke through the crushing noise of bodies beating one against the other and the hypnotizing touch of Winona’s fingers spread across his cheek turning his face one side to the other. “We’ve got to go,” Sam shouted into his ear.

Winona turned toward the sound and spit a curse into the muggy drunken air before she looked back at them. Her eyes were wide and blue and dangerous as a trapped animal. George didn’t know why he wrapped his hand around her wrist (he thought about asking: _is this ok_ ) and nodded his head _that way, over there_ but he knew how fast his heart throbbed in his chest when she followed him. Sam was dragging at his elbow, Winona was pushing even as she followed and they were squirming their way through the back rooms of the bar looking for a door to freedom.

Sam kicked the wall as Winona bit her lip and George looked past them toward the sound of the officers shouting over the noise. Everyone was getting arrested. “Man,” Sam hissed, “oh man, oh man…” 

“Maybe they won’t look back here,” Winona said. Then she squinted at them through the dim light. “Aren’t you in my sixth period?”

“I think I would have remembered you,” George said back.

She laughed like she was forgiving him for something. 

\--

“They say,” Sam said as he looked over at him, “your best friend is the one sitting next to you at the detention station saying ‘damn that was fun’.” The bench at the police station was hard, cold and uncomfortable under them and the clench of the cuffs was tight and abrasive. George was staring at a spot on the floor that could have been left there by a real criminal and not the sort that they were—underage at a bar, in a fight, waiting for their Mothers and Fathers to come pick them up.

“Sam,” George said, “shut up.”

Sam just chuckled and poked him with his bent elbow. “Lighten up, Georgie.”

\--

Winona-from-the-bar was really Winona Hepford: The school’s head cheerleader with a perfect grade point average and the charm of a song-singing siren. She wore soft, pretty, pastel, petal-pink cardigans over her cheerleading uniform and tall skin-soft white knee socks with black-polished Mary-Jane’s.

George only noticed because it was hard not to notice her. She was there in the middle of the hall with a group of football players and blonde cheerleaders all waiting for their turn to speak. She smiled at them with an innocent little grin and didn’t say a word about how she spent her evening. 

Maybe they wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

“George!” Sam shouted down the hall. 

Winona looked over at him, at how he had to look like he was just _staring_ at her, and she lifted her eyebrow at him like—like—

“Hey,” Sam said with a slap against his back, “how’d the folks handle it? My mom was _pissed_. I bet your dad was too.”

\--

“The thing is, son,” as they sat around the round kitchen table. His old man’s hands spread out as wide as they would go. All that dirt still in the cracks of his knuckles because it never did quite all wash off. His mother was looking delicate and confused as she fluttered about holding her teacup and then setting it down. “We’re not angry. We just don’t understand what you were doing at a bar, on a school night, without our permission.” 

George leaned back and looked them in the face.

His father looked right back at him—long and even—and said: “We’re disappointed, son. Do you understand?”

\--

Extracurricular activities looked good on official transcripts and George decided long ago that he needed every advantage he could get when it came to getting into the Academy. He was a good student and a good citizen—excepting getting caught last week in a bar, he had never been in any sort of trouble. Good did not secure him a place at the Academy when they searched for the _best_. 

So Mondays and Wednesdays after school he met with the chess club to practice for the national competition in the spring. Tuesdays he worked as the treasurer for the xenolinguistics club. Thursdays he helped the drama club any way he could that didn’t require him to be on stage. (Drama would look good on the transcript because it was more of a social club and it indicated he had creative thinking skills.) Fridays and Saturdays he had a part time job in the next town over at an old fashion-themed soda shop. He made Sundaes and ice cream floats and spent most of his time polishing the counter.

“You’re a hard man to find,” was Winona in her school-girl-outfit as she leaned across the shiny teal counter at the soda shop.

George wasn’t sure what to say to her so he smiled instead and put multicolored sprinkles on the Sundae for the little girl and her frowning mother. They sat in the corner booth and stared at him and Winona. “I didn’t realize,” he said.

She smiled at him. “I get the feeling there aren’t a lot of people looking for you.” Then she shifted on her feet and lifted herself up on a stool. “I just wanted to make sure your face was ok. No broken nose or anything.”

“I’m fine,” George assured her. He ran his finger down the bridge of his nose without meaning too and felt like a fool even as she laughed. 

“Maybe I wanted to say I was sorry too,” she said.

“Well, if you want to say it—then say it.”

There was her curious eyebrow again, lifting up over her blue eyes. He half wanted to blurt out something ridiculous like ( _why don’t you just leave your hair brown like that_ ) because her eyebrows were dainty and brown and her hair was too blonde. “Maybe next time,” she said.

“I should expect to see you again?” he asked.

“It’s a small town, George. It’s a smaller high school.” Then she hopped off the stool and curled her fingers as she waved him good bye and ran off to do whatever she found herself doing late at night on Fridays.

\--

Sam wasn’t off _restriction_ for over a month. George knew the second he was off restriction because he was on his motorcycle and roaring up the old gravel driveway straight to the back porch of the Kirk family farm. There was a loud exchange between Sam and his mother about shoes and dirt. The thunder of feet on the stairs and the soft patter of his mother following along.

Sam burst into the room with his arms flung wide. “I’m back, George!”

George turned in his desk chair to stare at Sam blankly until he got a glare in return. “Oh, that’s good, Sam.”

“I’ll bring you boys some cookies,” his mother said. She never did quite know what to make of Sam—he made her nervous. Maybe she figured if she threw enough cookies at him he’d settle down and learn how to be a nice boy.

(But when she said nice, Sam said boring and Sam could never settle himself to being boring.)

“She’s bringing us cookies, Georgie,” Sam said when his mother was out of sight.

“That’s my Mom,” George said.

Sam nodded, “and I love her. So what have you been up to? Studying? Good God, George if you get any more boring you’ll die.” He flopped back on George’s bed and rambled about the things he would have been doing if he weren’t on restriction and how that girl—what was her name, the one with the blue hair—had wanted a ride on his bike but he hadn’t been able to give her one.

“What about you,” Sam asked when they were sharing the plate of cookies, “you have any girls asking for rides?”

George couldn’t be sure why he thought of Winona, but he did.

“Of course you don’t. You know, George, you’re not bad looking. Maybe you should try talking to girls once in a while.”

\--

It was a week after the homecoming game and the cheerleading skirt had long since been replaced by a something else suitably feminine. George considered it something like a pastime (and everyone from Sam to his Mother told him he should get a pastime other than a part-time job and building model starships) to notice what kind of dress or skirt she was wearing. 

He was good at it, really. If the day was going to be cold she wore those pleated skirts that fell almost all the way to her knees and the tall boots that made her look something like the woman he met at the bar. When it was warm she wore something thin and cotton with a bit of lace peeking out from under it.

All during advanced physics he thought of how warm that lace and silk must be against her thighs. Over lukewarm nachos at lunch he contemplated how the cool wind made her cheeks pink and how there were little freckles across the bridge of her nose.

\--

“Do you even like—jerk off?” Sam asked him when he was supposed to be pushing hay across the floor. The Kirk family farm was run on the time-honored practice of hard work. The strength of a man’s back was worth more than all the fancy, glimmering contraptions in the world. Moreover, his father would say, there was pride in hard work. (And all their labor was free, there was that too.) 

“Sam!” he shouted.

“It’s a valid question, George. You have to—everyone does, I do—you have to so the question is what do you think about? Textbooks? Astrophysics? Rocket science? Me? I like pretty Orion girls. I’ve got this one vid that—”

“Sam!” he shouted again, one hand up to stall off any talk of naked Orion girls and whatever smut they were inevitably featured in. Sam had a stack of the stuff under his bed like his parents didn’t know about it. 

“You can borrow it sometime. Might help you out, you know. It’s not healthy.”

George rolled his eyes. “I’m plenty healthy.”

Sam laughed at that like it was a good joke. George threw a forkful of hay at him and it turned into nothing more glorious than a slap fight that had them rolling in the dirt and hay until their cackling brought his mother out of the house. She stood a few feet away with thin arms holding her sweater tight across her chest.

“Sam, dear,” she said, “maybe you should go.”

Sam was half sprawled across George, one hand against his shoulder and the other on his thigh pushing his knee to the ground. They were both pink from exertion and there was no telling what it really must look like. George waited until he was let go and sat up. “We’re almost done, Mom.”

“Of course, George.” She looked at Sam again before she turned to leave.

\--

George got tongue-kissed for the first time on a Tuesday, behind an old farmhouse, in the long fall-night shadows with a cold wind under his shirt and two hot hands on his face. It wasn’t what he thought it was going to be like. It was dirty, drunk and spiced with hot liquor that burned his lips and set his skin on fire.

It left him breathless, confused and clutching at soft girl arms just to keep that kiss right there. And when she moaned against his mouth he broke apart into a thousand pieces—sparking into the sky where the stars looked dim in comparison.

“Almost,” Winona had said into his lips as she pulled away from him. Danced out of his touch, beyond the end of his outstretched fingers and back toward the flames of the bon fire and the maddening roar of the rave. She laughed as she threw her arms open and twirled—as her hair moved around her like something alive. 

She was glowing. “Almost George, almost.”

\--

Winona curled her hair around two fingers while she read. She mouthed the words under her breath and when she found a sentence that she loved her breath would catch and her lips would curl up. George figured, maybe, if he knew all that she already qualified as a distraction and it wouldn’t do any harm to ask her if she wanted to get a soda with him after work Saturday.

“Winona,” he said in the library. 

She was sitting in the overstuffed armchair with her bag leaning against her chair and her legs pulled up under her. Her smile was blank as she looked at him. It was her school-girl look, the one that made him think back to the woman he’d met in a bar. “George Kirk,” she said.

“That’s me,” he agreed, “I was wondering if you wanted to get a—a soda or something after I get off work this Saturday—tomorrow.” His heart had never jack-hammered as hard as it did now. 

“I,” she said as she tilted her head to one side, “didn’t think you had it in you.” Then she pushed herself up to stand and flipped her fake-blonde hair over her shoulders. “I don’t think so, George. You’re Johnny Collegeboy and it looks good on you. I’m just not interested.” 

It was paradoxical how he was humiliated, furious and in love with her all at once. There was a girl in a leather jacket that threw a punch that knocked down a man twice as large. She was just wrapped up in pretty ribbons.

“You’re a liar,” he said to her back. (Soon, he thought, he was going to pass out. Oh yes.) “Just because I’ve got plans for my life,” he added when she turned to look at him, “doesn’t mean I’m Johnny Collegeboy—whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

Winona nodded her head. “I’m still not going with you.”

\--

Sam was struck speechless when George told him what he’d done: Completely, utterly, one-hundred percent speechless. His mouth had gaped and then closed and then gaped again. So George just walked away from him and took the public transporter to his part-time job. He spent half the night making waffle-cones until his clothes and his hair smelled like vanilla.

When he was finished he rode home on public transport and walked down the interstate to the farm. Sam was sitting on his motorcycle fiddling with his communicator, just waiting for him. He jumped up and pointed a finger at him.

“Hollow-Man’s rave,” Sam stated. “She’s going to be there, Georgie, bet your ass she is. Tomorrow, it starts at sundown.”

Of course. “I want to go,” George said.

Sam whooped at a victory he hadn’t secured. To him, it didn’t matter, or maybe it was just something he’d been waiting for since the first day they’d stumbled into one another in the halls of the high school. George was boring and Sam was rebellious and nobody ever understood that they understood one another. 

“It’s going to be so great, George. You’ll see.”

\--

Winona was wearing her school-girl clothes at the rave, sitting primly in a crowd while the others moved in drunken eddies around her. George stopped across the fire from her, stared at her through the orange glow until he knew she was looking back. He didn’t wave, he didn’t smile. He didn’t feel right wearing old worn-out khakis and a T-shirt Sam had given him that didn’t fit quite right.

Once she knew he was there, once she knew that he knew why she’d turned him down, he walked away. There were pockets of teenagers passing around bottles and drugs and listening to music that roared over the sound of the fire. Someone was setting off firecrackers with gleeful shrieks of amusement. There were ATVs running in the dark playing a game of tag that was going to get someone killed. George found somewhere worth sitting and accepted a cup of something just so it’d look like he was drinking it.

When Winona found him later, she was missing her pink sweater but her skin was so hot her touch burned him. She didn’t say a word when she kissed him.

\--

Everything ended with a brawl. Some tall quarterback-jock type grabbed Winona when she was just trying to dance. George moved forward without thinking about how she could take care of herself. She hit the quarterback in the jaw and he fell into George and knocked them both over. By the time they were on their feet everyone was screaming and throwing fists around. Winona was rubbing her hand through her loose long hair.

George caught her hand and didn’t think ( _can I, is this alright_ ) but _follow me, I know the way_. He took her to the edge of the glowing light to where Sam was crawling over some pretty girl with bright blue hair. “Sam, I’m taking your bike.”

Sam might have said _ok Georgie_ or _fuck no you aren’t_ and it wouldn’t have mattered because George had one leg across the bike and Winona had two arms around his chest and her whole fever-hot body curving against his back.

\--

“This isn’t,” she slurred against the back of his neck. Her tongue was hot as her skin—hotter maybe—“where I thought you’d take me.” She fell when he moved to get off the bike. Her body was limp and furiously hot as he bent and scooped his arm under her legs. Her eyes were closed as her head fell back and one of her arms was hooked around his neck but the other was hanging loose at her side.

George could have asked her where else he would have taken her but she was unconscious. The lights of the emergency medical center were powder blue and the inside was as cold as an icy wind. The nurses rushed out from behind the counters, someone had a gurney and she was whisked away from him while they shouted questions about:

What. Where. When.

He threaded his hands through his hair, behind his head and said again and again: _I don’t know, I just don’t know_.

\--

Winona’s father name was James. George stood up when he saw the man rush past the sliding doors, with a wild and frantic look in his eyes and a leather jacket clenched in his fist. He was wearing an officer’s uniform and there was a short woman with a padd clenched under her arm following him, speaking fast in a language George didn’t recognize.

“Captain Hepford,” is what George called him, “my name is George Kirk.”

“Who?” Captain Hepford demanded.

“I was with Winona.”

Years later, with a laugh, he’d tell someone that he only ever got into the Academy because he got punched unconscious by an angry Captain. At the time, all he remembered thinking was that Winona must have learned how to hit from her father.

\--

George snorted awake with a throbbing headache. There was a pulse-pounding to the world around him that sounded a lot like someone was shouting. He rolled toward the sound, reaching out for the edge of the bed he was laying on. Found himself in a darkened corner with a curtain partitioning him off from the fight.

“Damn it, Beth,” Captain Hepford was shouting, “you were _supposed_ to be taking care of her! She was _supposed_ to be safe here—what the hell was she doing out there with—”

“James,” was a desperate whimper.

“This is unacceptable! This is fucking, one hundred percent unacceptable—I can’t—you—this is _unacceptable_ ,” like he was shouting into a voice amplifier.

George might have been stupid to stumble his way toward the curtain, bare footed on cold floors, just to find the man that hit him again. It wasn’t anything he had any right to be involved in. It wasn’t anything he should have cared to see and there he was pulling the curtain back.

There was a woman in a nightgown clutching a pink cardigan like a shield, the nervous looking assistant still holding her padd and the Captain himself bright red with anger. The leather jacket was still tight in his fist but he was pointing a finger into the woman’s face. “I’m taking her. It’s through, Beth. I don’t give a _damn_ what your lawyer says. Fuck them.”

“Dad,” interrupted the shouting.

“You need to get back in bed,” followed.

Winona was standing there in the mint-green hospital gown. The nervous nurse was hovering at her side and Winona pushed right past her to where her father stood. “It’s not Mom’s fault. Stop shouting at her.”

“You’re a child,” the Captain said, “she’s an adult. You could have died—they said you would have died if you hadn’t gotten—damn it, Winona.” He hugged her so fiercely George felt awkward watching it. She was small wrapped up in that hug.

When she pulled back, she was looking at him. The corner of her mouth pulled up in something that was almost a smile. George smiled back. “Thank you,” she said.

The Captain turned around to look at him. He cleared his throat as he forced his shoulders to relax. “I owe you an apology son,” he said. He stuck his hand out like a handshake was going to solve everything. His eyes were just as blue as Winona’s but his apology was impatient to be accepted.

George shook the man’s hand.

\--

Winona told him good-bye across the teal counter at his part-time job. She had a khaki bag slung across her shoulder across the black-leather jacket. Her lips were pretty pink but it was really her, that woman he’d met in a bar that was everything he didn’t want.

“You came to tell me good-bye?” he asked after she ran her hand across the countertop and announced her intent. “You never even said hello.” Whatever he meant by that, she seemed to understand.

“If we meet again,” she said, “I’ll say hello. Right now, I’m leaving and I wanted to tell you good-bye.” 

He watched her nod because he had nothing to say. She nodded to herself and turned to leave like it was just going to be that. It should have been just like that because she was no part of his plan. Every muscle in his body clenched up tight until he was going across the counter instead of through the swinging door and running after her. 

She turned before he got there, a strange half-smile on her face as she grabbed him by the apron and kissed him again. He wrapped his arms around her and repeated over and over like she could hear him: _I never want to let you go—I never want to let you go—I never—I never—I never._

Winona moved first, back and away from him. “Someone just might make a man of you yet,” she said like she had every secret of the universe wrapped up under her skin. She kissed him again; just the press of her lips and then turned away from him.

\--

Sam sat at George’s desk and nodded his head to punctuate the finality. “I guess,” he said—“I mean…it’s a good thing, maybe? She was just going to be a distraction or something.” He pushed a book across the desk like a nervous gesture.

George stared up at the models hanging from his ceiling. Each of them were hours of his life—hours and hours he’d spent in this little room. Beyond there was the map of the stars he’d glued to the ceiling when he was a kid. The stars glowed when the lights were off and sometimes, when it was dark and he couldn’t sleep, he looked up and imagined his future.

“Shit, Georgie—want to—watch porn or something?”

George laughed. “That’s ok, Sam. I’m good.”

\--&\--

Winona hadn’t spared a third thought on George Kirk in just about four years. He was part of those hazy, lost, long-ago days of teenage rebellion when she couldn’t quite decide which sort of what she wanted to be more: That girl with the dark-dark-blue lips and the leather jacket that could tackle full grown men and hit them hard or the sweet-cherry-darling cheerleader with the pink lips and the sweet smile. It had been obvious, to her, at least, that her mother wanted the cheerleader. So Winona had tried.

Shouting at crowds was as numbing as wearing short skirts in cold weather and boys that leaned her back against a locker and thought they were hot shit with their jock jackets. Now and again, when the crawling itch under her skin got to be too much and she had to scream or lose it, she found herself in dirty bars down the road _that away_ with a bag full of essentials and half a notion to stick her thumb out and keep right on going.

Anything, anything, anything but where she was—that was where Winona wanted to go.

George Kirk had happened into her way like a lost puppy. He had serious eyes and a sweet smile. He was the sort of boy that wore his shirts tucked in and washed behind his ears and under his fingernails without having to be asked. In every way that mattered, he was better than her. All that she knew just from looking at him in a dirty bar. 

Everything else she learned about him when he stared at her across a bonfire and asked her what the fuck she was doing _here_. Just for a minute, looking back at him, Winona wondered if she could be the sort of girl that George must have wanted. It was another identity to fit herself inside of—someone with skirts below the knee and sensible boots who planted vegetables in the garden and knew what they were doing tomorrow. (The sort, she thought, who would wake up to arms around them every morning, a kiss and a hug and a whispered _I love you_.)

He had surprised her once in the chaotic matter of months he had followed her around the school. It must have been a lack of courage, a lack of confidence or maybe just the good, solid, logical common _sense_ to stay the fuck away. (That one’s trouble.) She remembered him best in the library of the school, with an angry look on his face as he called her a liar. George knew the truth.

But those days were gone. They were gone as soon as the door closed and her father drew in a breath and looked at her with that smile of his that said he had no idea what he was doing. _It’s me and you, kid_.

Yeah.

Me and you.

That was gone too. It was just me now—no you. 

Then there was: George Kirk was across the lawn of Starfleet Academy with his shirt hanging from his hand and an easy, carefree grin across his face. There were two girls in running sweats laying on the ground watching him while he raised his arms like he was telling a story.

Winona thought—( _they must be in love with him._ )

Why not? Johnny Collegeboy looked good with his shirt off.

\--

Winona had become a full-grown adult at age seventeen, six months, two weeks, three days and somewhere around seven hours. The glowing green numbers of the chronometer she’d dug out from under her bed when she’d gone searching for the communicator had said oh-seven and maybe fourteen minutes, maybe forty one. She didn’t always remember it right; the numbers were always blurry early in the morning after she’d spent half the night drinking.

She was still wearing her girl-clothes when she became an adult, wrapped up in some man’s jacket with an familiar and not entirely welcome feeling of something sticky on her thighs and the lingering thought that she’d intended to go to the closest infirmary before she got home and didn’t. There was a twenty-four hour window for rapid-acting cures to common STDs. So she was licking the taste of yesterday’s mistake out of her mouth when she closed her hands around the communicator and squinted at the clock. She was rolling onto her back on her bedroom floor with her arm across her eyes and the advance theories book digging into her ribs when she opened the communicator and managed to slur a: _what’s’it_ at whoever was calling.

She never remembered exactly what they said. All she ever remembered was that her father was dead and she was alone—that was it, no you, just me.

\--

Tony Someone-or-another had skin that was as slithery as a snake’s. He was warm like sun-warmed rocks and his eyes blinked left to right and not up and down. He was the exotic, dashing, slick-talking bastard that all girls got wet between their thighs over. Winona kept him because he was useful to have.

Winona collected people. They were useful.

Tony could get her whatever she needed, yesterday and maybe sooner than that if it was necessary. He was going to be an engineer because he liked to play with little bits of something that fit together into something bigger. All he wanted in return for supplying her with all her darkest vices was once in a while to slip that slithering hand right up the hem of her standard-issue-cadet uniform and feel what he wanted to feel. All she had to do was lean back against the heavy metal table lodged against the wall of the shop he did his work at and let him do it. 

It was an effective business relationship.

Carey-with-the-name blushed blue when she talked about sex so she never brought it up. But when she needed to study for that last test he was always willing to supply the snacks and dorm bed. She could bring her books and study until she fell asleep and he’d be curled up in a nest of dirty clothes on the floor because he’d never-ever-not-once touch her like that. 

She liked him but he looked at her like she was homeless, lost and hopeless.

Rachel was her roommate. She was useless as far as Winona was concerned. Classified somewhere between a faceless plebe running around campus looking for their next class and one of those civilians that stood at the gates staring through the slates dreaming about what kind of something must go on in there. Rachel couldn’t give Winona anything but a _sympathetic ear_ and the certain knowledge that no matter what Winona could do or couldn’t do, there was always Rachel with her average grade-point and her average looks and her average family: mom, dad, one-point-five kids and a cat named Sugarstix. 

Rachel was the kind of girl that Winona’s mom wanted.

There were others, they did their jobs and they demanded their recompense. Winona kept them revolving around her like planets in orbit and thought—once in a while—that she should tell them it was only a matter of time before she exploded and took them all out too.

\--

George had a girlfriend. Coralyne with the red hair told her during their physical training period. Winona hadn’t asked and she didn’t want details but Coralyne was the sort of person that didn’t need to be asked.

“ _Yeah_ ,” she said as she pulled herself up over the bar, “I heard it’s like a big deal. Apparently they met back wherever he’s from. Somewhere in Ohio or Idaho or Iowa or something. She was his prom date and they ended up joining the Academy together so they’ve been together for years. It’s a shame, if you ask me, that someone like that has to have come pre-taken. I didn’t even get a decent run at him, you know.”

“Like that?” Winona repeated.

“Nobody you’d like,” Coralyne conceded. 

\--

Winona would whisper to Sam (her Sam, not George’s Sam) years later that she’d had his Daddy’s heart in her back pocket since they day they met. That first day, in the bar, far from the sunny skies of San Francisco and the promise of a future that George had wanted all his life.

Half of it. Mostly all of it.

The thing was that George had fought hard to get to the Academy. By the time he was jumping up the stairs two at a time, carrying his bag under his arm and carefully puffing his breaths like they taught you in high school physical education, he had _known_ what his life was meant to be for ten years. 

Ten years of certainty, of plans, of a chart on his wall that mapped out every detail to the smallest detail. Ten years of careful thought of what looked best and what was worth the trouble. Ten years of after-school activities and volunteering and shoveling shit at the family home to get on those steps.

Winona only had to stand at the top of those steps. George stopped dead with one foot on the top step and one in the air and _stared_. 

He shouldn’t have recognized her. Her hair wasn’t white-blond-bleached-out, her clothes weren’t pastel pink accentuated with black leather. She was a full-grown woman now and he was a full-grown boy. Oh, but he knew her—strip away four years and there it was. Two idiot kids outside a soda shop and one desperate kiss that all the alcohol in the world hadn’t burned from her memory.

“Winona,” he gasped. A man just coming up for air—then he fell face first into the platform when the next person after him forgot to pay attention to what was in front of them. She didn’t stay to watch him pick himself up—there were classes to get to and the hard (thud-thud-thud) pulse of her heart to consider.

George was a good boy that knew what he was doing. That kind of guy that everyone woman wanted to take home to meet their folks and Winona was just waiting to explode.

\--

“I see your manners haven’t gotten any better,” was not nearly as venomous as George probably thought it was. The man did not have it in him to be the sort of furious that he thought he was being. 

Winona pushed her hair away from her face as she stood up and tapped the tool against the side of her thigh. “I’m sorry, do I know you?” There was the loud clatter-crash-crank of the others still working. There were plenty of broken things that needed to be fixed and she was wasting precious time staring back at this man. 

“George Kirk,” he said. He didn’t say _you remember me_ and he didn’t say _you remember my body against yours_ and he never would have thought to insinuate _I saved your life_ but he was so close—trembling to ask— _how did you get here?_ “You’re Winona Hepford.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I am—are you that guy that fell on his face the other day. Nice shiner.” She pointed the tool toward his face and the bruise across his cheekbone. “You know there’s lots of doctors over in the infirmary that would love to take care of that for you. Might make you prettier.”

When he looked across the open bay of the lab, across the broken shuttles and out toward the daylight soaking in through the mechanical doors, it wasn’t because he was broken hearted. At least not because she had forgotten him. He looked back at her and nodded once. “It was nice to see you again,” he said.

She wanted him to say those other things. Those things like _you’re a bitch_ and _you never learned to stop lying_ but his mother had loved him just like he was (oh _Georgie,_ the pancakes are on the table and I squeezed this orange juice just for you) so he learned right-wrong-and you never say that to a lady.

“Right,” she called to his back when he walked away. “Whoever you are,” she said to herself.

\--

When she lost track of reality, she flew. Not in the ships like her father.

No, she flew across the sky with her arms out at her sides and she sang a little song that went like this:

(never gonna come back, no, no, no, not no more)

but the beat never followed the music and she had to twist around just to find where the words matched the throb until she thought that she was going to tie herself into knots and squeeze them out like water from a rag—and when it fell to the floor it was going to sing a little song that went like this:

(la la la lost li-i-i-ittle g- _irl_ —)

the sound would be like heavy steel on empty pans, long dented by demented little children and her voice would get shrill and hoarse until it wasn’t a song but a scream and she would be nothing but a dried bit of dead thing floating back to the ground to be burned with the other debris and when she was consumed in flame she was going to chant a little hum:

(georgie porgie, pumpkin pie, he kissed the girls and made them _cry_ ).

\--

George was everywhere after that. He was in the corridors. He was on the lawn. He was in the town on long afternoons and free weekends. He stood up to recite pledges and mission statements during assemblies. He was on the debate team. 

He was in the only decent hamburger shop in San Francisco with his arm around a pretty little blonde girl who looked like the girl that Winona had tried to be. 

Winona was nowhere for a while. Wasting her time between the last flight and the next one. Sometimes she was pushed back against a metal table with one heel up on a broken shell of a hover bike and the other quivering as some slithery-skinned man named Tony (Someone-or-another) fucked her like a business transaction. He called her dirty, he called her nasty—he called her all the things she really was.

Sometimes she was cross-legged on her dorm bed with her school books spread out around her. She was here because her father had told her she was the sort of person Starfleet needed. He saw her like nobody else did—he saw potential for the thing she could be but he never quite decided what she was.

It was fair, Winona didn’t know what she was.

She knew what George was when she saw him with his arm around that girl that looked like her (but wasn’t). 

Coralyne said: “They’re going to get married,” like it was fact and not speculation.

\--

There was a social affair called a ball after the turn of the seasons. It was some kind of informal training exercise for fancy functions they might be called to attend. Everyone wore dress uniforms and tried to act like they weren’t itchy-scratchy-damn uncomfortable in all the wrong places.

Winona went with nobody.

George went with his pretty girlfriend with the name Winona wasn’t going to learn. He held her in his arms and danced with her until the music was exhausted and the punch was sweet-cool-perfect. The pretty girl excused herself to the bathroom (oh, she looked like the sort that said _facilities_ or maybe _little girl’s room_ with a clever blush). Winona wondered if they fucked, thought they must make love.

Winona found herself next to a punchbowl. All her life she wondered what kind of whatever she was supposed to be, what she wanted to be. She’d traded an identity for another until she had lost track. She knew—at last—exactly who she was when she stopped in front of George.

“I hate that girl,” she said like her and George were anything but something that wasn’t four years ago. “I hate her every time you look at her.”

George held his punch glass in his shaking hand and narrowed his eyes at her. (His mother loved him, his Daddy too, and he had never heard words like _this_ before.) “I knew you remembered me,” he said.

Winona was the girl that kissed another girl’s boyfriend in front of a crowd of gawking cadets and didn’t feel an ounce of shame. His lips were slack under hers but his hand was warm (so damn warm) against her arm. He urged her back and licked her lipstick off his lips. “I want—” she said.

She never got to say it. The girl she hated was back and screaming at George and he fumbled his drink and his excuses. 

So she knew now. Who she was.

\--

Knowing didn’t change anything for twelve hours. 

Sometime after noon, the day after, she lifted herself out of bed and stripped out of her dress uniform. She looked at her naked body in the mirror and sighed to herself and thought ( _well, this is you_ ) and she squeezed a tit because it seemed like the thing to do.

She found her running clothes and her shoes and hit the button on the wall to open the door. The whole damn world should have shuddered from the force of the orbital shift. George Kirk was standing outside her door, dressed in gray running clothes, wringing his hands one inside the other and taking deep breaths.

There were two girls in the hall staring at his back.

He looked at her and he was nothing but a little boy again. “So,” he said all in a rush, “what do you want and please don’t tell me its spare change or a puppy because I just spent all night breaking up with my girlfriend and as soon as my mother finds out she’s going to fly out here and kill me.”

Winona bit her lip. (You’re my sun, Georgie, I never knew.) “You,” she said.

\--

George must have moved first or Winona did. One of his arms was behind her back and the one hand was on her face. Her arms were over his shoulders and her feet weren’t on the floor because her legs were hooked around him.

He kissed her like she was whole and perfect. When the doors closed behind them and they were alone he held her so close she cried into his shoulder and he whispered _shhh, I’ll never leave you_ into her ear.

\--

Nothing was perfect. 

Winona wanted sex when George was sitting on her bed in his boxers with the rubber-ducks and nothing else but a textbook in his lap but George wanted to study. She would lay against his side with nothing but her pink-cotton-underwear on and he would stroke his thumb up and down her arm like he was _that chaste_ and _that determined_ and it made her so angry she wanted to bite him.

Sometimes she did, bit his arm and his chest and his shoulder right below the collar of his uniform until he asked her what was wrong and she said _I want you to fuck me_ and he never understood why she talked like that. She never understood why he hadn’t pinned her to the bed yet.

_I’m not that kind of guy_ , he said when she finally asked. They spent a while not looking at one another and he looked over at her as miserable as a kicked puppy. _Do you—do you really want me too?_

When he tried, it made him miserable to hold her down (and he was just _bad_ at it) and she laughed so hard they couldn’t save the mood. So they snuck over the fence and out into the city and sat at a street stand with ice cream cones talking about stars, space stations and what they were going to do with their lives.

\--

It was a Saturday, late past one in the morning, when George threw his head back and spit the word: “Fuck!” in the dense air of the bar like it’d been waiting all his life to get screamed. Sam—George’s Sam—beat the table with his fists like they were a set of drums.

“Sing it, Georgie,” Sam said.

Winona laughed as she leaned across the bench and wrapped her arms around him. She stuck her tongue in George’s slack-drunk-dirty mouth and he put his hands under her shirt and down her skirt and her heart went (thud-thud-thud) a little strange. His fingers were sloppy and ignorant and she shivered when they touched him.

“How’d you do it?” Sam demanded when she sat half back and George’s hands didn’t move. His eyes were slow-half-closed and his tongue was red across his swollen lips. “I’ve been working on this all our lives, man, all our _lives_.”

“Guess you didn’t have the magic touch,” Winona said. She pushed George’s hand down out of her shirt and pulled back so his fingers slid up out of her skirt. “Maybe we should go.”

Sam beat the table and George picked up the next shot glass to down it too. “Fuck,” he said with a wheeze.

Winona leaned across the table to grab the last two—(stupid, stupid, stupid George!)—and downed them one after the other. She slapped them against the table loud enough it echoed over the sleazy crawl of the dingy music. “We’re going,” she said.

“Gonna fuck her,” George said to Sam and Sam nodded his head.

“God, to be you,” Sam said.

The next morning, George woke up miserable and repentant he puked first and then started begging for her forgiveness second. She didn’t know how to tell him that he was perfect exactly how he was and she never wanted him to be anything else.

\--

Iowa was a bleak, gray, frozen expanse of nothing in contrast to the sunny shores of San Francisco. George stood in front of her with his hand out and his head to one side while she hesitated. “You promised, Win,” he said.

This was part of it, she knew. The part she had never gotten around to getting to before. The part where she had to survive meeting the parents—she had to be someone they wanted with their son. She wasn’t half convinced most days that she was someone George should have been with (just a girl, she thought, that was willing to steal someone else’s boyfriend). “They’re not going to like me,” she said into the frosted chill of the air. 

Christ, George had gloves that matched his coat and a hat with a fluff-ball thing on the top. His _mother knitted them_ and she was wearing some coat that she’d woken up in and the scarf that matched George’s hat. She was nothing at all that belonged across the line that took her that last step toward realizing this was nothing she wanted to lose. 

“I’ll like you,” George said, “Even if you laugh at my rocket bedsheets.”

Winona laughed and kicked a dirt clod. “You don’t have rocket bedsheets.”

George just smiled at her, eyebrows up and wiggled his fingers to tell her (come here, I dare you,) and he said: “I guess you’ll never know if you keep standing there like a stubborn mule.”

\--

George had rocket bedsheets and quiet parents. The one were worn so thin they barely covered the mattress but they were so soft and smelled like George even after he was out of bed before dawn to tend to farm work. The others were twitchy and touchy and wide-eyed-aghast about her.

Winona made sure she had all her clothes on before she stumbled into the hallway (late, late, late) far too early in the morning to be conscious and fell into the bathroom to turn herself into something presentable. She played her music loud in her ears while she brushed her teeth with George’s toothbrush and sprayed her shirt sleeve with his cologne because it smelled _like him_. They weren’t sure about her when she took a chair next to George at the family table.

They said grace. She felt awkward while they spoke to this thing called God.

Tiberius tried. He was a great big bear of a man that was as gracious as George was careful. His hands were tough as tread but they were as gentle as butterfly kisses as he showed her how to handle the horses. There were two—(they were meant for one another, Tiberius said).

Laura took her son aside in the morning when Winona should have still been upstairs listening to her music and steaming up the bathroom. She hissed little whispers as sharp as snake fangs. _She’s just not the right girl for you, George. Whatever happened to Aurora? Aurora was a good girl_.

George sighed. _Mom_.

Winona pushed her back against the wall the wall and looked up at the ceiling and wasn’t sure if he wanted George to agree with her or tell her to go to hell. In the end, George did neither because Tiberius was there lumbering in from the morning chores and asking about his breakfast.

\--

“What?” George demanded with his hands out, palms up and just _confused_.

“I’m never going to make you breakfast at four in the morning,” she shouted across the dead grass to where he was sitting on the old picnic table. Her breath was a puff in the air, his disbelief was a liquid heat down her back. “I’m never going to say grace before dinner, I’m never going to knit you—hats and booties and—”

“Of course you’re not!” George shouted back at her. “Damn it, Winona, did I ever _ask_ you to?”

“You will!” she screamed at him. Feet in the dirt, wearing his scarf and so out of place she couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d have her sleeping in the barn with the other animals soon. “You will,” was only a sigh quieter. “It’s who you are, George. God, I don’t even know why you—”

“Bullshit,” George said right to her face. “You know why I love you.” When he said it, however he said it, he meant it straight through his body, straight through her, and straight up to the stars where the starships were. 

“I can’t be that girl your mother wants,” Winona said. 

“Who cares?” George asked her. “ _I_ want you.”

He did and she knew it.

\--

George never—ever—told her what he said. It was the heavy slam of a wooden door and the sob of a woman from across a whole household. George was shivering hard as he yanked open his drawers and threw all their clothes into their two bags. She pulled on shoes over her pajamas, a coat and he held her arm as he pushed her down the hall and stairs and out the door.

His mother was in the front room (the sitting room, dear) screaming _what have you done to my boy—what have you done to my baby_ when George pushed against Winona’s arm and out into the cold air. 

He didn’t talk for hours—long after they’d walked miles down the road carrying their half-packed bags. Long after Sam stopped his car next to them and hung his head out the window and didn’t say a lot but: “Well, it was inevitable. Happens to everyone, George.” 

Winona sat in the backseat of Sam’s car while they sat in the front and she couldn’t shake how cold she felt. 

She stood in the dirty kitchen of Sam’s dim apartment while she made grilled cheese and green beans. Her earns burning the whole time to catch even the whisper of an explanation about what she’d missed. It never came, not out loud. Sam seemed to know the whole story and offered his congratulations and condolences.

“Look at that, George,” he said, “Someone’s finally made a man out of you.”

\--

It was Tiberius that brought them the last bag of their belongings. He handed it to George with a heavy nod and shook his son’s hand. “I’ll take care of your Mother, son.” Tiberius hugged her the way he brushed his great, giant hand down the neck of his favorite mare. 

“You take care of my boy.”

“I will,” she said and she meant it, straight through her and straight through him and all the way to the stars.

\--

The thing was, she got pregnant first and it couldn’t have been worse timing. The finals and then practical training. She was puking during the whole two weeks she was meant to be working engineering and she couldn’t sleep on a cold bed all by herself. 

George’s voice was tinny across the communicator, late at night, as he talked to her about pointless-pointless-stupid things. He always said: “I miss you, I love you.” 

It was three months in before she told him. ( _George, I’m pregnant_.) He licked his lips and smiled like it was all going to be ok—better—great—this was exactly what he’d waited his whole life for. He didn’t say ( _well now we have to get married_ ) just _I love you, I love you so much—what is it? A boy? A girl? What do you want, Win? I love you._

The wedding came later.

\--

Sam (George’s Sam) always said that it was a half-assed attempt to honor someone as great as him when they decided to name the baby after him. George Samuel Kirk? With a snort and a well aimed finger he said:

“The last place I ever wanted to be was _in_ George.” A wink and an elbow to the ribs he added: “Not that you’re not a sexy beast, Georgie.”

Winona laughed and George blushed and it was perfect.

\--

“George,” she said one morning about seven months in. She was petting his hair and he was humming sweet lullabies to her belly. Dorm beds were too little for her, George had to curl like a sea-horse tail to fit. 

“Hm?” he hummed. “I think you’re beautiful, Win.”

“Which is good,” she agreed because she had taught him to remind her when she felt ugly and fat. “But I think you should ask me to marry you. I think,” she trailed her finger down the back of his ear, “if you did, I wouldn’t tell you no.”

George hummed at that. “Well,” he said like he considered it very carefully, “maybe we better wait until you’re sure.”

He never said: _I gave up my family for you_ and he’d never let her think it but sometimes he must have thought it. Still, he rolled a little, onto one elbow so he could look at her. She brushed his bangs away from his face and ran her fingers down his jaw. “Maybe I’m not the only one that isn’t sure.”

“It’s in the plan, just not yet,” George assured her.

She smacked him and his stupid plans and he squealed like a girl and took it like a man.

\--

Sam was born in the middle of the afternoon right after her last exam when she couldn’t ignore the contractions anymore. She gasped, “George,” into the communicator and found the nearest person to grab by the arm and demanded they take her to the infirmary. 

Their baby was perfect—every bit George and every bit her and neither of them had ever been as beautiful as this baby boy. George cried and she didn’t even tease him about it (not then, but later). They sat wrapped up in one another while their baby slept in her arms.

Someone, she thought years later, should have taken a picture. Someone should have saved that moment forever (and after that too) so years later when everything was loose at the edges and she couldn’t (feel, smell, taste) remember him in perfect clarity (the little brown spot on the back of his knuckles, the way his eyes squinted when he smiled, the way he laughed sometimes like he was going to cry, the way he swayed when he held her and how he never remembered the right words to nursery rhymes so he quoted regulations into little Sam’s little ear until he bored him to sleep) she’d have that moment.

\--

Sam was a year old, wearing shorts with no shirt and chasing a ball across the floor when George’s parents showed up at the door with their arms full of apologies. Winona stood in her very own kitchen (paid for with her very own job and that was her very-own-time-away-from-her-child) while George talked civilly to his parents about the whole thing. Sam was at her legs, head tipped back, mouth open, too young to ask her what was going on and why she was so angry.

(Because honey, your Daddy is mine now and your Mommy never, ever—not once—has been good at sharing.)

\--

The wedding was after graduation. Sam was almost three years old with a suit on and a grin that stretched ear to ear. Winona wore white even if she hadn’t been a pure angel years longer than she ever wanted to tell George. There was a long aisle and a whole crowd of people that Sam had gathered up (friends of George) and his parents and a few friends that survived the orbital shift in Winona’s life.

Her mother was there, in the front of the pews with a man Winona didn’t recognize and a few kids that looked like they might have been her brothers and sisters. Mostly, there was George at the altar and Sam walking in front of her with a pillow that didn’t have rings on it. 

Tiberius escorted her down the aisle and gave her away with a whispered ( _take care of my boy_ ). She squeezed his wrist and said ( _he’s my boy now, Tiberius_ ) and he laughed.

George had tears in his eyes when he slipped his ring on her finger. When he said _I do_ he meant it straight through her and straight through him and straight up to the starships.

\--

It was only (only?) a few years. 

Sam was almost four, chasing crickets across the porch. Tiberius was an old man with a gentle voice that promised that he’d take care of her boy. Laura was a used-old-woman who’d lost a war and spoke softly to Winona like she was afraid she was going to steal her grandson the way she’d stolen her only son.

George told her it would all be alright, that they’d be back before she knew it and Sam was going to be fine with his parents. (Of course he would, look at George.) The three of them walked down the road together, all holding hands, and George talked tall to a little boy about how Mommy and Daddy were going to be gone for a while.

He was on one knee in the driveway, kissing his son’s forehead, promising: “we’ll be back before you know it, champ.”

\--

Jimmy was born in a disaster.

Most days, Winona thought it just about figured that the boy was confused from the moment he was born. Those first things he heard—the scream of alarms, the cracking sound of the ship breaking apart over the intercom, his father’s voice saying ( _I love you_ ) and the shattered sound of Winona’s sobs. 

Jim was damned from the first breath.

George could have handled him—he could have handled them both. Sam wasn’t so hard, a little hard-headed but he had one of those plans about where he wanted to go. Winona just didn’t know what to do with Jim because she knew that he felt like he belonged exactly nowhere and there was nothing that he could do about it but fight. He burst from walking to fist fighting with no time between to think about how else he could have spent his life. 

She wiped his bloody nose and she taped up his bloody knees and she told him—now and again, when they saw one another—( _don’t give up_ ) if he remembered it like ( _don’t lose_ ) she thought it wasn’t too far from the original.

She told him, when she had the chance, when he let her tell him, _I’m proud of you_ and sometimes he laughed at her and said: _why, Mom? Because I’m not in jail today?_ and sometimes he wouldn’t look at her.

George could have turned his head back around, would have known what to say—would have shown his boy how to grow up right. George was the sun and Winona was just waiting to explode.


End file.
